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GOES-16 Offers Spectacular View of July 19 Derecho

GOES-16 offers an amazing look at the derecho that tore through the north-central Plains on July 19, 2017.

This 1-minute infrared imagery from GOES-16 offers another look at the derecho that drifted across South Dakota and Minnesota, and into northern Iowa on July 19, 2017.

A derecho (pronounced day-RAY-cho), a widespread and usually fast-moving windstorm associated with convection. Derechos include any family of downburst clusters produced by an extratropical complex of thunderstorms, and can produce damaging straight-line winds over areas hundreds of miles long and more than 100 miles across.

The group of thunderstorms associated with this system produced a heavy rainfall, strong winds estimated to be 70 to 80 miles per hour that downed trees and power lines, frequent lightning and possibly a tornado.

This animation was created by "sandwiching" or combining data from the red-visible and longwave infrared bands offered by GOES-16's Advanced Baseline Imager. The 'sandwich' approach to creating satellite imagery means that two spectral bands are being displayed at the same time, with one being transparent. In this case, the two bands are the "red" visible band (reflected light) and the transparent infrared window (heat of the emitting surface) for a threshold of cold values, available from GOES-16's Advanced Baseline Imager. Combining these two bands allows both the cloud-top thermal structure and the finer detail of say over-shooting cloud tops from the visible band to be seen.

The reference to "1-minute" in its name refers to the frequency with which GOES-16's Advanced Baseline Imager captured an image of the storms.

This imagery appears here courtesy of our partners at the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies. For more information about CIMMS, visit the organization's website.